Rabbis drafting criminal legislation: The shaping of the prohibition against bigamy for Jews in mandatory Palestine

To a large extent, the roots of Israeli family law go back to the British Mandate for Palestine. British policy was to enshrine in legislation the jurisdiction of religious courts, so that marriage and divorce would be conducted according to religious law only. At the same time, the British believed that a criminal prohibition should be imposed against bigamy. The Article describes the conflict between Jewish marriage law and criminal law on this matter. The reason for the conflict lies in the complexity of the Jewish bigamy law, which is not uniform for all Jews. A comprehensive archival review shows that it was one specific criminal case that alerted the British mandatory authorities to the fact that they had created a problem in the area of criminal law, at least as far as bigamy offenses of Jewish men were concerned. Because of the complexity of the matter, the task of repairing the relevant section in the criminal code was assigned to the Chief Rabbis of Palestine. On their part, the Chief Rabbis used the opportunity that was offered them to impose on all Jews in Palestine the halakhic approach that rejects bigamy. Naturally, this move involved the Rabbinate and the British in a serious conflict with the various groups of the Jewish population that opposed the amendment of the law. But the amendment created by the Rabbis succeeded, and Israeli criminal law to this day is based on it. This is an exceptional case of a criminal law that distinguishes clearly between Jewish and non- Jewish populations in Israel.